Searchers combing a Northern California town leveled by a deadly wildfire stepped up their efforts Sunday ahead of rains forecast later this week in the fire zone where 76 bodies have been recovered so far.

A feel-good tale of a homeless man using his last $20 to help a stranded New Jersey woman buy gas was actually a complete lie, manufactured to get strangers to donate more than $400,000 to help the down-and-out good Samaritan, a prosecutor said Thursday.

Migrants in a caravan of Central Americans arrived in Tijuana by the hundreds Wednesday, getting their first glimpse of the robust U.S. military presence that awaits them after President Donald Trump ordered thousands of troops to the border.

The infamous Mexican drug lord and escape artist Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman was alternately portrayed at his U.S. trial on Tuesday as a calculating leader of a bloodthirsty smuggling operation that funneled tons of cocaine and other drugs into American cities and a scapegoat for a conspiracy whose actual mastermind bribed crooked Mexican officials as high as the president to keep his freedom.

Ernest Foss was a musician who gave lessons out of his home when he lived in San Francisco, where an amplifier that ran the length of a wall served as the family's living room couch. Carl Wiley refurbished tires for Michelin. Jesus Fernandez, known as "Zeus," was described as a loving father and loyal friend.

CNN took its access battle against the Trump administration to court on Tuesday, demanding the reinstatement of correspondent Jim Acosta's White House credentials because their revocation violates the right of freedom of the press.

Authorities called in a mobile DNA lab and anthropologists to help identify the dead as the search went on for victims of the most destructive wildfire in California history. The overall death toll from the outbreak of fires at both ends of the state stood at 25 Sunday and appeared likely to rise.

A Northern California wildfire that moved so fast firefighters didn't even try to stop it killed five people, authorities said Friday as the blaze quadrupled in size after leveling much of a town of nearly 30,000 people. Only a day after it began, the blaze near the town of Paradise had grown to nearly 110 square miles (285 square kilometers), and investigators found the dead in vehicles that were torched by the flames.

President Trump's combative relationship with the media deteriorated further Wednesday with a news conference where he called some reporters rude and accused a PBS reporter of posing a racist question when she asked him about white nationalists.

President Donald Trump, emboldened by Republican election wins in the Senate and scornful of GOP candidates he felt didn't sufficiently embrace his support, delivered a stark warning to the new Democratic House majority on Wednesday: Investigate me, and I'll investigate you — and the government will grind to a halt.

The Democrats took back the House with a surge of fresh new candidates and an outpouring of voter enthusiasm Tuesday, breaking the GOP's monopoly on power in Washington and setting the stage for a multitude of investigations of President Donald Trump that could engulf his administration over the next two years.

Votes were being counted across half the country Tuesday evening as the energy and outrage of the Democratic resistance faced off against the brute strength of President Donald Trump's GOP in a fight for control of Congress and statehouses across the nation.

President Donald Trump, his shadow hanging over midterm elections that will determine the future of his administration, used his final campaign pitch to ask voters to help preserve "fragile" GOP victories that could be erased by Democratic gains in Congress.

The day of reckoning for American politics has nearly arrived. Voters on Tuesday will decide the $5 billion debate between President Donald Trump's take-no-prisoner politics and the Democratic Party's super-charged campaign to end the GOP's hold on power in Washington and statehouses across the nation.

The 5,200 active-duty troops being sent by President Donald Trump to the U.S.-Mexico border will be limited in what they can do under a federal law that restricts the military from engaging in law enforcement on American soil.

An acrimonious meeting of world leaders in Papua New Guinea failed to agree Sunday on a final communique, highlighting widening divisions between global powers China and the U.S. The 21 nations at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Port Moresby struggled to bridge differences on the role of the World Trade Organization, which governs international trade, officials said. A statement was to be issued instead by the meeting's chair, Papua New Guinea Prime Minister Peter O'Neill.